I had a great idea for a Decade in Review list. It was going to be: “The Decade’s 10 Dumbest Decade In Review Lists.”

I was going to put the list itself sixth or seventh, because I’m meta like that. But I ran out of steam about two deep, because I got really bored scouring the Internet for dumb decade-in-review lists, plus I don’t really begrudge people the right to wax nostalgic at the times when it is deemed socially appropriate.

I’m not immune either, of course. I did write this just the other day, after all. I just usually spend more time, for better or worse, speculating about the future than remembering the past.

And I’ve got to be honest, I thought things would be a lot cooler by now.

Seriously: This is 2010? The future sucks.

I distinctly remember reading in Ms. McKenna’s third-grade class, when it turned 1990, that by 2010 we’d have a colony on the Moon. No joke. I read that in some sort of science magazine they handed out to elementary school kids. Oh, and Back to the Future II sure made it seem like hovercars would be pretty well established by 2015.

Where are all the hovercars? Why am I still grounded in my dented 1999 sedan like some sort of chump or sucker? Answer me that.

Heck, the Jetsons were supposedly set in 2062, according to the Wikipedia. Are we 52 years away from living in that world?

Get on it, science.

I mean, look: I don’t want to sound like an ingrate. I have a phone that gives me access to every bit of information I could possibly conceive, plus thousands of songs, and it streams video of live baseball games. I suppose that’s OK.

But we still can’t even get to Mars! Mars! Not even outside our own damn solar system! Are you kidding me? As the great comedian Jake Johannsen has pointed out, we transmit signals to far reaches of the galaxy in hopes of making contact with intelligent life, and what are we going to say if they answer? “We can meet you on the Moon”?

So I expect big things out of the next 10 years. Big, big things. Awesome things. I don’t mean like, “oh, we’ve really made the Internet better and more universally accessible, and now we have Hybrid cars that could save the Earth, and we’ve made tremendous strides toward curing various diseases” things, I mean like, “robot dinosaurs we can fly.”

Here’s hoping for that. Enjoy whatever festivities you get up to or don’t get up to tonight, and good luck in the coming decade. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year.